Sony executives have privately expressed concern over ruffling religious sensitivities with the film, especially since the studio has simultaneously been courting the Christian niche audience with films like Left Behind: World at War, the straight-to-video evangelical thriller it distributed last year.
Sidney Sheinberg, the former president of MCA-Universal, which released The Last Temptation of Christ, the 1988 film by Martin Scorsese, was skeptical that a Web site would satisfy those who found The Da Vinci Code insulting to their religion.
"That suggests that people who have an opinion are going to put the opinion where you tell them to," he said.
Sheinberg spoke from bruising experience. The Last Temptation, which depicted Jesus, while on the cross, doubting his faith and fantasizing about a more prosaic life, ignited a firestorm of protest against the studio, and Sheinberg received death threats, hate mail and even a pig's head mailed to his home at the time.
The former studio chief said he had appealed to various Christian groups before that movie's release but did not succeed in quelling outrage from others. In his experience, he said, the most intense outrage often comes from those who do not bother to read the book or see the movie.
John Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said that the Web site is an intriguing strategy for an industry often denounced by Christians.
"In some sense it gives evangelicals and other religious people a forum and a degree of legitimacy because they've been asked to give a critique," he said. "On the other hand, you could see this as a modest amount of co-op-tation, like Sony is saying, `You guys are getting your say, so leave our movie alone."'
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